At present, a value-added service is an important profit source in the telecommunications industry, and a Business Operation Support System (BOSS) is the core and the key point of the value-added service management. The BOSS has become the most complex part with the most contents in all services, and it also has features like a large network size, multiple business lines and a large number of users, so as to make the development, maintenance and use of the BOSS more complex.
With the wide application of the value-added service, various outsourced parts for realizing the value-added service (namely, a software module or a hardware module, usually is a pluggable module, for example, Electromagnetic Compatibility (EMC), Network Appliance (NetApp), a load balancer, an Allied Telesis switch and so on) are applied to a communication system, and alarms of these outsourced parts are managed by the BOSS. An outsourced part alarm module related to network management in the BOSS becomes a module that is relatively difficult to be maintained in the BOSS, because it is complex to realize the alarm; with the diversity of the alarm of the outsourced part, the difficulty of maintaining the outsourced part alarm module is increased.
The alarm of the outsourced part, namely, the BOSS performs a certain processing on alarm information and a notification message which are sent by the outsourced part and then sends them to an upper-level network management system of the BOSS. At present, the BOSS basically uses a customizing way for managing the alarm of the outsourced part; when the outsourced part is added to the communications system, it is needed to correspondingly add the alarm function supporting the outsourced part in the BOSS, and the process comprises: modifying codes of the outsourced part alarm module in the BOSS according to the Management Information Base (MIB) descriptive information of the outsourced part needing support and the a definition of an alarm level, so as to add the function of parsing a Trap message and a Syslog message of the outsourced part; and upgrading the version on site after the test indicates that the code is modified successfully, thereby providing support to the alarm of the outsourced part. When it is needed to modify the MIB description of the of the outsourced part or the definition of the alarm level, the way of modifying codes is also needed to be adopted to realize improvement to the alarm function of the outsourced part.
At present, the customizing way is adopted in the BOSS to manage the outsourced part, with defects that it is needed to adopt the way of modifying codes to realize the function of parsing the message of the outsourced part whenever one outsourced part is added, so as to add support to the alarm of the outsourced part; in addition, aiming at the outsourced parts of the same type, if the model numbers are different, the is corresponding descriptive information of the MIB and the definition of the alarm level are different; and because parsing of the message at each node adopts the way of hard coding, for the outsourced parts of the same type with different model numbers, it is also needed to adopt the way of modifying codes to support the alarm; with addition or replacement of the outsourced part and the diversity of requirement on the alarm of the outsourced part, realizing the support to the alarm of the outsourced part by adopting the existing method will cause the code processing capacity of the outsourced part alarm module to become larger and larger, and cause the code maintenance to become harder and harder, and more and more complex, so a new processing method is urgently needed to realize the alarm function of the outsourced part in the BOSS.